Others on Prufrockian wonder: "Are we going to leave this mess for the next president?"

Consequently, George lacks any kind of Prufrockian pathos.

Eventually, they experience Prufrockian moments of clarity - or, rather, moments of claret - and opt for a little 11th-hour redemption.

It's likely that an audio book of the play or film will be released, and that would be a good way to absorb Shawn's disturbing, introspective, Prufrockian words.

The character's supposed sensitivity, however, too often comes across as morbid self-absorption, and his supposed intelligence is undermined by his partiality to such overworked literary references as the Proustian madeleine and the Prufrockian peach.

The mini-series has some racy stuff, too, and a main character, Harry Wyckoff, who strongly resembles Faulkner's Harry Wilbourne, a Prufrockian sort who is constantly aware of his own moral turpitude but has little control over his life.

Intimations of Eliot abound, mostly in the form of Prufrockian "You and I's" and passages like "Here I am then,/ continuing but ever beginning/ my perennial voyage, into new memories" (from "The Skaters"), which mingles "Gerontion" and Four Quartets.

So he composed his locutions of Pierrot, his Prufrockian philosophical clown, a new blend of the sad poet and the silly fool, a character who was the consequence of a long love affair - an affair of felt affinities and exchanged glances between damned poets and comic actors.

While many of us stew helplessly in a state of Prufrockian paralysis - and the national political mood seems embodied in calls to put the matter behind us - those representatives dared to balk at this "get along with business" mentality, to remind us that the first business of a democracy is to determine the people's choice for president.